What is the name of the utility class providing static methods for collections in Java?

The Java utility class that provides static methods for collections is java.util.Collections.

Collections is a final class in the Java Collections Framework, and its methods operate on or return Collection objects such as List, Set, and Map implementations. It supplies widely used algorithms including sort, reverse, rotate, shuffle, binarySearch, min, and max. It also provides wrappers for synchronized, unmodifiable, and checked collections.

The class was introduced with the Collections Framework in Java 1.2. Its methods are static because the class is not meant to represent a collection itself; instead, it offers operations that work with collection instances supplied by the caller. For example, Collections.sort(list) operates on a list, while Collections.unmodifiableList(list) returns a read-only view.

A common mix-up is java.util.Arrays, whose utilities focus on arrays rather than Collection objects. java.util.Collection is an interface describing a group of elements, not a static utility class. The similarly named java.util.Collections class is therefore the canonical answer whenever a question asks for Java’s collection utility methods.